Tastes: An Aesthetically & Morally Sensitive Approach Laurie Hanquinet University of York

Taste is not all about aesthetics; it is not all about social forces either What makes the high art high? Is it that its appeal is mostly to high audiences? Then what makes the audience high? That its taste is for high art? (Cohen, 1999, p. 142)

Towards a theoretical model? Seeks to give aesthetics a substantial role in the account of tastes  Aesthetic values should be treated seriously  Aesthetic values evolve over time: how are these historical developments being internalized into cultural classifications?  Aesthetics interacts with morality to fashion the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ taste

But first, a note on the difference between aesthetic experiences and aesthetic classifications

Socio-historical genesis of aesthetic classifications Aesthetic criteria are the products of historical moments Role of the habitus in the development of renewed aesthetic dispositions  Need to update our vocabulary?

Another look at Bourdieu’s theory Cultural capital is based on the idea of accumulation of resources, which was, in Bourdieu’s mind, led by different aesthetic principles Highbrow aesthetic: abstract (form over content), disinterestedness, distance, affective neutralisation Popular aesthetic: concrete, immediate, emotionally teinted But Bourdieu’s definition of highbrow culture draws on an implicitly modernist aesthetic that needs to be updated < changes in the field of cultural production: what is aesthetically refined has changed

Aesthetic paradigms Modernism challenged the traditional characteristics of works of art, such as representation, harmony and beauty, and artistic skills  detachment in arts appreciation and autonomy of artworks Postmodernism e ndorses a playful aesthetic based on trangression and experimentation  Merges life and art, the commercial and popular  Possibility for art to encapsulate visions of how to live together

Morality & Aesthetics ‘[I]n many instances everyday judgments of taste are not only understood as a question of aesthetics but that they are also matters of moral, ethical and communal sensibility’ (Woodward & Emmison, 2001, pp. 296–297, highlighted by me)

Morality: different levels of consciousness (Vaisey, 2009) Discursive consciousness e.g. Heinich (1998): Moral values can be used to justify rejections of contemporary art Practical consciousness : ‘ethical dispositions’ (Sayer 2005) and aesthetic dispositions are intertwined in the definition of the good and the bad ‘people do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely arbitrary and conventional; they feel that they are natural, proper and moral. An attack on a convention and an aesthetic is also an attack on a morality’ (Becker, 1974: 773).

A model as conclusion

Indirect role of socio-demographics Condition the set of values people can have at disposal – according to the social context they live in Influence the selection of aesthetic and moral principles people operate in the development of their cultural capital Not the end of cultural hierarchies and symbolic domination  More insidious, hiding themselves being the ideas of diversity and plurality Society still divided between those who have taste and those who don’t with the social and economic advantages that go with it

THANK YOU